The Old Vengeful

'I had a bit of trouble in France . . . once upon a time.' Paul drew a deep reminiscent breath. 'So they'll have my name and number written up somewhere for sure . . . Not here, but somewhere . . .'

'What sort of trouble?' She knew he wasn't going to tell her, but having some first-hand experience of the sort of troubles he had she didn't really want to know anyway. And that unfledged thought itself was enough to make her feel what she realised she ought to have felt all along: not surprised, and neither angry with the Frenchman nor herself, but just plain scared.

Two thumps sounded from the inner office, saving Paul the dummy3

trouble of not replying, and to her intense relief the Frenchman reappeared with a smile on his face and the passports in his hand—

'What kept you?' Aske smiled at her in his usual half-shy, half-friendly way, but eyed her appraisingly at the same time as he held open the door of a big blue Renault. 'Mmm! I like your new scent, Miss Loftus—very chic and expensive!'

'That's probably what kept us,' said Paul irritably. 'Let's get out of here. We should have come by the hovercraft, like I wanted to do.'

'Another three hours on the journey—if you're in such a hurry,' said Aske mildly. 'Where to now?'

'But no awkward questions.' Paul sat back. 'To the hotel.'

'They were inquisitive? Well ... I suppose you're a bit out of the ordinary. This isn't exactly a tourist spot—it's just a stop-over to and from the coast, though the old city's very fine . . .'

Aske looked over his shoulder at Elizabeth '... I got us into a place in the old city, I thought you'd like that . . . medieval walls more or less intact, and a nice little 17th-18th century citadel—not a Napoleonic PoW depot, of course—too small for that . . . the nearest one of them is Sedan, then maybe Longwy. Then Givet to the north, on the frontier, and the three to the north-west—Arras, Valenciennes and Cambrai.

And the big one to the east, naturally—Verdun. I wonder you didn't prefer Verdun for your base, Mitchell, even if the dummy3

escape party didn't break out of there. It was the main British prisoners' depot, after all.'

Paul merely grunted, but Elizabeth sat up.

'Oh yes—I'm an expert too, now—an instant expert!' Aske appeared to have eyes in the back of his head. 'I'm your man on British PoWs in France, and French PoWs in England, circa 1812— and on the year 1812 too ... a very interesting year seemingly, as years go. 'The 1941 of the Napoleonic War', no less.'

'I didn't know you were a historian, Mr Aske,' said Elizabeth.

'I'm not. Politics and Economics were my student theatres of activity—and cookery at night school ... I must not deceive you, Miss Loftus—I did say 'instant' expert.' Aske snuffled to himself. 'In the division of labour yesterday, after you were removed from my charge I drew one of Dr Audley's old dons, Professor—now Emeritus Professor—Basil Wilson Wilder . . .

once the terror of generations of idle Cambridge undergraduates, but now retired from the fray on Portsdown Hill, above Portsmouth.'

'Professor Wilder!'

'You've heard of him? You know him?'

'Yes—I mean . . . that is, Father had a frightful row with him a year or two ago.'

'Did he, now? I find that a little surprising. He seemed to me to be a really darling old gentleman, and he's certainly a dummy3

positive goldmine of information on the period . . . What did they row about?'

'Oh ... it was about a letter he wrote.' The memory of Father's explosive rages during the Vengeful renaming correspondence still made her wince. 'What did he tell you about the prisoners? Did he know about the Vengeful survivors?'

'Not specifically. But he did agree with your father's conclusion about them—that they weren't included in the Decres propaganda letter to Napoleon in the Moniteur Universel with the allegedly full list of successful British escapers down to September, but they were in the Lautenbourg Fortress in early August—and they didn't turn up anywhere else thereafter, and weren't listed anywhere else as having been recaptured or died of natural causes . . . He reckoned the French killed them right enough—he said that, apart from the conflicting stories the French told, sending them to Lautenbourg was suspicious in itself. Because no one had ever been sent there before, and no one ever was again.

'Something fishy, but I don't know what' was his conclusion—

and here's our hotel—' he swung the car under a narrow archway, through a passage, and into a tiny courtyard '—

then we can have a proper session, once we've installed you—

it's all quite fascinating, Miss Loftus—I haven't been involved in anything so absolutely fascinating in ages!' He turned to Elizabeth with an expression of disarmingly innocent enthusiasm. 'There's a sweet little cafe in the square—'

dummy3

'We're not going to sit in any cafe.' There was anything but an expression of innocent enthusiasm on Paul Mitchell's face. 'For any 'proper session'.'

'No?' Aske took his disappointment philosophically. 'Then what are we going to do?'

'I've got phone calls to make. You deal with the bags. And I want to be on the road in twenty minutes.' Paul sounded a bit like Father on one of his off days.

'And then where?' Aske's obedience didn't include total abasement.